Reader Reviews Retro Special

The Secret of Monkey Island (PC)

by Garvan Butler

Wait! Before we begin, let's have a quick history test. LucasArts released their best adventure game in which year? Get it wrong three times and you'll be thrown back to the DOS prompt. Yes it's true, Monkey Island is older than that grand old tradition of hating Gates' operating systems, which the human race didn't really begin in earnest until late 1995, and even the copy protection technique is memorable.

In fact every part of this game is memorable. So much so that I don't actually have - or need - a copy to hand as I write this review. The game begins as it means to go on - Guybrush Threepwood wants to be a pirate, a fact he boldly declares to every last beggar he meets. Thankfully only half of them laugh at him and soon enough he is set three challenges; to retrieve the Idol o' Many Hands, to learn how to swordfight and to do something else. Okay, I lied about the memory thing.

What follows, as you make your way around Melee Island searching every nook and cranny of every new screen for clues, are some of the classiest scenes from computer gaming's brief history. There's the sword fighting insults, the underwater escape and the automated sequence in the governor's mansion when Guybrush uses the wax lips with the Rhinoceros. Monkey Island was satirising adventure gaming's conventions even as it invented them.

No doubt you are thinking that we all look at the past through rose-tinted glasses. But if we take them off we'll see that the graphics and sound haven't aged as badly as we suspected, still imbued with more than their requisite of charm, and that, far more importantly, great gameplay, like that new yoke down the post-room whose gender you haven't quite yet determined, doesn't date. This game is as good as it ever was, which is far better than most. But I don't have room enough to prove it to you here. You'll just have to go out and acquire yourself a copy. [Or join me in commanding LucasArts to follow Broken Sword's lead and release the early Monkey Island titles on the Game Boy Advance! -Ed]